Mostly fun campfire ghost stories marred by pseudo-scientific babble and a self-conscious rock-star attitude.
Slipknot singer sees dead people.
Apparently, Taylor (Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good, 2011) has backstage passes to the spirit world that not many of us are privileged enough to get: He not only sees ghosts on a regular basis, but he’s also convinced that the same spooks are haunting him everywhere he goes. His first recollection of seeing ghosts was around the age of 9, when he and some friends went on a Goonies-like adventure to a scary-looking old house in his suburb. In that house, he saw his first sinister apparition, which seemed to be an old man who wanted the young whippersnappers out of his house. From then on, according to Taylor, his life has been one big spook-tacular extravaganza filled with supernatural occurrences. (Later in the book, the author does his tedious best to scientifically prove that these spirits can, in fact, walk the terrestrial plane among us.) Taylor recalls stories about seeing a shadow man in a cornfield trying to attack him; he was once pushed down the stairs by a malevolent, otherworldly force; every time he buys a new Munsters-style mansion, it turns out to be haunted by the spirits of dead children. To Taylor’s credit, all these anecdotes about his close encounters with the spirit world are told in exacting detail, and you certainly want to believe him. Unfortunately, insecurity about how his theories and stories will be received comes to the fore in a big way: Taylor alternates between annoying self-deprecation and smug self-congratulation, spending too much time on humorless, expletive-laden rants against those who would dare question his place among the elite few who have regular interface with supernatural beings.
Mostly fun campfire ghost stories marred by pseudo-scientific babble and a self-conscious rock-star attitude.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82164-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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